Biologique

Articles

• Toward a new philosophy of preventive nutrition : from a reductionist to a holistic paradigm to improve nutritional recommendations
  27 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  The reductionist approach has been predominant to date in human nutrition research and has unraveled some of the fundamental mechanisms at the basis of food nutrients (e.g., those that involve deficiency diseases). In Western countries, along with progress in medicine and pharmacology, the reductionist approach helped to increase life expectancy. However, despite 40 y of research in nutrition, epidemics of obesity and diabetes are growing each year worldwide, both in developed and developing countries, leading to a decrease in healthy life years. Yet, interactions between nutrition-health relations cannot be modeled on the basis of a linear cause-effect relation between 1 food compound and 1 physiologic effect but rather from multicausal nonlinear relations. In other words, explaining the whole from the specific by a bottom-up reductionist approach has its limits. A top-down approach becomes necessary to investigate complex issues through a holistic view before addressing any specific question to explain the whole. However, it appears that both approaches are necessary and mutually reinforcing. In this review, Eastern and Western research perspectives are first presented, laying out bases for what could be the consequences of applying a reductionist versus holistic approach to research in nutrition vis-à-vis public health, environmental sustainability, breeding, biodiversity, food science and processing, and physiology for improving nutritional recommendations. Therefore, research that replaces reductionism with a more holistic approach will reveal global and efficient solutions to the problems encountered from the field to the plate. Preventive human nutrition can no longer be considered as “pharmacology” or foods as “drugs.”

• A conceptual model of the food and nutrition system
  27 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  The integrated model developed here included three subsystems (producer, consumer, nutrition) and nine stages (production, processing, distribution, acquisition, preparation, consumption, digestion, transport, metabolism). The integrated model considers the processes and transformations that occur within the system and relationships between the system and other systems in the biophysical and social environments. The integrated conceptual model of the food and nutrition system presents food and nutrition activities as part of a larger context and identifies linkages among the many disciplines that deal with the food and nutrition system.

• Ultra-processed products are becoming dominant in the global food system
  26 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  The relationship between the global food system and the worldwide rapid increase of obesity and related diseases is not yet well understood. A reason is that the full impact of industrialized food processing on dietary patterns, including the environments of eating and drinking, remains overlooked and underestimated. Many forms of food processing are beneficial. But what is identified and defined here as ultra-processing, a type of process that has become increasingly dominant, at first in high-income countries, and now in middle-income countries, creates attractive, hyper-palatable, cheap, ready-to-consume food products that are characteristically energy-dense, fatty, sugary or salty and generally obesogenic. In this study, the scale of change in purchase and sales of ultra-processed products is examined and the context and implications are discussed. Data come from 79 high- and middle-income countries, with special attention to Canada and Brazil. Results show that ultra-processed products dominate the food supplies of high-income countries, and that their consumption is now rapidly increasing in middle-income countries. It is proposed here that the main driving force now shaping the global food system is transnational food manufacturing, retailing and fast food service corporations whose businesses are based on very profitable, heavily promoted ultra-processed products, many in snack form.

• Davantage de repas végétariens à la cantine pour concilier qualité nutritionnelle et protection de l’environnement
  29 septembre 2022, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  En France métropolitaine, environ 8,5 millions d’enfants déjeunent chaque semaine en restauration scolaire. La composition de ces repas est soumise au respect des règles imposées par l’arrêté et le décret n° 2011-1227 du 30 septembre 2011 « relatif à la qualité nutritionnelle des repas servis dans le cadre de la restauration scolaire »...

• Fortifier les aliments pour lutter contre les carences ?
  3 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  Où l’on apprend que la lutte contre les carences en micronutriments passe notamment par la diversification des régimes alimentaires ; une bonne manière de soutenir la diversité des productions. Pourtant, ce sont des solutions techniques comme la supplémentation ou la (bio)fortification, jugées plus innovantes, qui prédominent encore dans les politiques nutritionnelles pour répondre aux enjeux de malnutrition.

• Devenir sain. Des morales alimentaires aux écologies de soi
  26 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  S’alimenter sainement n’est pas qu’une occasion de répondre à des exigences sanitaires et alimentaires propres à la construction d’un corps sain, c’est aussi une manière de penser le monde et de le pratiquer. Le devenir sain est exercice critique face aux conséquences d’une société réflexive, où l’incertitude devient le maître mot du rapport à la connaissance et aux institutions. Il exprime les exigences d’une société orthorexique et cherche à les transcender.